INTERVIEW

Sophia Loren on The Life Ahead and the men from her past, from Cary Grant to Marlon Brando

Sophia Loren started acting at 16, became a global icon in her twenties, was adored by Peter Sellers and Richard Burton – and, at 86, she’s still mesmerising on screen. But, she tells Stefanie Marsh, it all began with a childhood overshadowed by poverty, hunger and war

Left: Sophia Loren in 1965. Right: Loren, now 86, photographed at her Geneva home in August 2020 by her son, Edoardo Ponti
Left: Sophia Loren in 1965. Right: Loren, now 86, photographed at her Geneva home in August 2020 by her son, Edoardo Ponti
GETTY IMAGES, EDOARDO PONTI/NETFLIX
The Times

Sophia Loren inhabits such a high-spec level of superstardom that she doesn’t know the Rolling Stones wrote a song about her.

“Who?” she says, a disembodied, heavily accented voice calling from her home in Geneva.

The Rolling Stones, I repeat. There follows a puzzled silence. The band’s ode to Loren is on 2010’s remastered Exile on Main St’s bonus disc, a double album originally recorded in the early Seventies, around the time that – by implicit and infatuated international consensus – Loren had artfully dodged the threat of being given ever diminishing roles in the mould of “exotic hottie” by Hollywood, to earn her rightful title, Screen Goddess. But the song is ringing no bells today. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards may be household